However, there is ordinary conductivity in place in the material before the superconductivity switches in. Which is similar to the position @Possibility describes with consciousness. The potential for superconductivity is there.

there are no intermediate states between x not being conscious at all, and x being conscious. — bert1

I've been giving this some thought, and realised that there are such states, they are exemplified by the research I referred to. The mouse senses the faint moving line, without seeing it. The mechanisms responsible for conscious experience are operating, but below the threshold where consciousness begins. We can see this from the outside. It's in the nature of consciousness that a gradual onset would be difficult for the "user" to detect.

You might also consider your own present experience. If your attention is drawn to it, you will become aware for example of the pressure of your chair against your body, or the position of your tongue in your mouth. But what about all those things while you're not attending to them? There's a shading in and out of consciousness there.

Again when certain types of anaesthetic are administered we can see a gradual diminution in neuronal activity, corresponding to a greying out of conscious experience.

Again, consider the gradual development of the nervous system in a foetus.

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A bacterium swimming up a chemical gradient is an entity, with what we might call unconscious purpose, unconscious intentionality (its swimming motion is related to the chemical), unconscious sensing.

Before x can be conscious, there has to be an unconscious x.

An Enrique original lol It's a reasonable presupposition that all this low frequency EM radiation generated by the brain is doing something, going somewhere. The coherence field model is my hypothesis, which I think is very likely to be proven but remains fodder for basic research. — Enrique

That's what I'd feared since I first read your post. It's just free-floating fantasy, unmotivated, baseless, worthless, pointless.

"Grey matter of dendrites, soma and the interior of axons is darkly shaded because it absorptively superpositions with large amounts of EM radiation to form percepts."

Where did this idea come from?

In an academic paper I would expect to see references. Something to back this up: "Grey matter of dendrites, soma and the interior of axons is darkly shaded because it absorptively superpositions with large amounts of EM radiation to form percepts."

Coherence fields explain why brain matter has a darkish tint while myelin is white. Grey matter of dendrites, soma and the interior of axons is darkly shaded because it absorptively superpositions with large amounts of EM radiation to form percepts, while myelinated white matter strongly reflects the light that does not penetrate atoms so radiative fields minimally attenuate across space.

This in particular seems like fanciful nonsense.

Does the coherence field model seem intuitively plausible to you? — Enrique

It seems like a fantasy.

It is hypothesized that this EM radiation superpositions with molecular structure as it spreads to comprise percepts, the hybrid wavelengths of which form subjective images while wavelength vibrations result in subjective feel. — Enrique

What evidence do you have for this? How would you test the hypothesis?

Call it an abstract. What is at the centre of your idea?

Can you do a TL:DR?

Very good question. If you take modern biological definitions, then it would very much appear so, yes. But if you mean by 'life' (as some do) a centre of experience, then I think the answer is 'no'. — bert1

What's the rationale for that distinction then?

As Searle asked of me when criticising panpsychism, — bert1

Have you discussed this with John Searle??

I can offer you an argument more explicitly than I have done so far.

Consciousness does not admit of degree
All process or functions admit of degree
Therefore consciousness cannot be a process or function.

Every emergentist theory of consciousness I have come across associates consciousness with some kind of gradually emergent process or function. I can't improve on that, I can't think of a plausible emergentist theory that finds some binary event in nature and says 'That's where consciousness emerges'. — bert1

The mechanisms responsible developed in your foetus until at some moment you were able to feel something. We can see that the process of development of the mechanisms is gradual, but it's in the nature of consciousness that to the user it can only appear to be instantaneous.

Researchers trained mice to push a bar to get a reward when they saw a grey line moving across a screen. They identified neurons firing in synchrony with the appearance of the grey line. Then they made the line more faint, until the mouse couldn't see it and didn't press the bar. But the researchers could still see neuronal activity synchronised with the line the mouse no longer saw.

There is degree in the process.

I've very much enjoyed thinking about this.

I can offer you an argument more explicitly than I have done so far.

Consciousness does not admit of degree
All process or functions admit of degree
Therefore consciousness cannot be a process or function.

Every emergentist theory of consciousness I have come across associates consciousness with some kind of gradually emergent process or function. I can't improve on that, I can't think of a plausible emergentist theory that finds some binary event in nature and says 'That's where consciousness emerges'. Even if it did, there would still be the question "OK, but why can't that happen without consciousness? What is it about that that necessitates an experience?" — bert1

Thanks Bert1. Lots to think about there. I'm going to read up a bit about Emergentism, and I'll come back to you about your ideas.

As you said, this is a discussion about Panpsychism, but I've introduced my own ideas about "life" as a precondition for consciousness, as an alternative to Panpsych. So I'm wondering:

Does "life" admit of degree?

I'm conscious that we are encouraged to apply the Principle of Charity in discussions like this. We should "interpret a speaker's statements in the most rational way possible and, in the case of any argument, consider its best, strongest possible interpretation".

I'm sincerely struggling to interpret your last post in a rational way, or to find any argument for the existence of mind in molecules.

Sometimes, with people, we are looking for a psychological explanation of their behaviour. But often we aren't. Why is that person lying on the ground? Well it's because they tripped over a paving stone. We could state that in terms of physics, talking about momentum and the centre of gravity. Or perhaps there is a different explanation in terms of neurons etc. The person had a stroke and their neurons aren't working properly. Or perhaps there is a psychological reason: the person is seeking to avoid detection.

But when we see them trip over the paving stone, we don't say "it was because the centre of gravity was too far forward, but there must also be a psychological explanation". Yet that, as far as I can see, is the structure of your argument.

I wonder, do you put your ideas into practice in real life? Do you attempt to explain the behaviour of inanimate objects in psychological terms? "Why is that stone rolling down the hill?" "Because it wants to".

That's no better. "Comparable" is too vague in meaning. It can be defined as "able to be likened to another" but also as "of equivalent quality".

An electronic knowledge base is quite unlike a human memory.

In my view there is still a "self", but not the conscious experiencing kind.

Perhaps that's why I included the words 'kind of' and put them in quotes for emphasis. — universeness

That's no way to achieve clarity is it? "The Mars Rover "kind of" emulates human thought".

As I mentioned, nature has had billions of years on billions of stars to hit on something like that. It happens by chance. Because it can. There isn't a "why". I mean, you're asking "why is there life?".

It can't be explained, just described. — bert1

Chemotaxis can be explained. Here's the explanation:

The central mechanism of signal transduction involves two families of proteins found in microorganisms and plants which work in pair-wise fashion to mediate chemotaxis, as well as other regulatory processes ranging from cell differentiation and development to antibiotic resistance and fruiting. E. coli alone has over 30 different examples of these so-called ‘two-component’ regulatory systems.
One of the families of proteins that mediate two-component signaling consists of histidine protein kinases, which catalyse the transfer of γ-phosphoryl groups from ATP to one of their own histidine residues.The other family consists of ‘response regulator’ proteins, which are activated by the transfer of phosphoryl groups from the kinase phosphohistidines to one of their own aspartic acid residues.
Most histidine protein kinases are transmembrane receptors with a variable external sensing domain connected via hydrophobic membrane spanning sequences to a highly conserved autophosphorylating kinase domain in the cytoplasm. Stimulatory ligands interact with the receptor's external sensing domain to control the rate of kinase autophosphorylation and hence the rate of response regulator phosphorylation in the cell's interior.
The response regulators are generally free to diffuse around the cytoplasm, and aspartate phosphorylation generally enhances the ability of a regulator to bind to DNA, or in the case of the chemotaxis response regulator, to bind to motor proteins and regulate the probability of a tumble.
The histidine protein kinase that mediates chemotaxis responses is called CheA and the chemotaxis response regulator is CheY. CheA differs from most histidine kinases in that it is not an integral membrane protein. Instead, CheA is tightly associated with, and regulated by, several different transmembrane chemotaxis receptors, each of which functions to detect a different class of attractant and repellent chemicals. These receptors transmit a signal that increases CheA autophosphorylation when attractants are absent or repellents are present. Increased CheA phosphorylation leads to an increase in the level of phosphorylated CheY.
Phospho-CheY diffuses from CheA freely through the cell, and when it encounters a flagellar motor it binds to a flagellar protein called FliM. Phospho-CheY bound to FliM induces tumbling by causing a change in the sense of flagellar rotation from counterclockwise to clockwise, as viewed from behind. The six to eight flagella scattered over the cell surface rotate coordinately to form a bundle during smooth swimming. This bundle is suddenly thrown into disarray when one or several of the motors reverse direction, causing the characteristic tumble that randomizes the direction of the next period of coordinated smooth swimming. Whereas the receptor–CheA complex controls the rate of CheY phosphorylation, a phosphatase termed CheZ is responsible for phospho-CheY dephosphorylation.

If that isn't an explanation, what is missing?

But when we ask for finer and finer details, we get to forces, and 'no further explanation is possible, we are just describing what happens'. That's where I suggest a further step is possible, and perhaps even necessary, and that is to say that the observed behaviour is the result of will. The idea is that physical explanations of the bacterium's behaviour is, at least, reducible to psychological explanations. — bert1

But why should that be necessary? What does it add to our understanding? We can already explain how a bacterium swims up a chemical gradient in exhaustive detail, and they do this automatically, without will. What looks like "will" is the result of natural selection, automatic, non-psychological, because no psyche is involved. What's the motivation for your introduction of the psyche, when the process can be explained without it?

This system does 'kind of,' emulate how humans access their previous experience to make decisions when faced with new unpredicted/unexpected conditions never encountered before. — universeness

Emulate: match or surpass (a person or achievement), typically by imitation.
"most rulers wished to emulate Alexander the Great"

Computing
reproduce the function or action of (a different computer, software system, etc.).
"the adaptor is factory set to emulate a Hercules graphics board"

The Mars Rovers do not match or surpass the way humans access experience because they don't have experience.

They don't reproduce what we do.

They do something different to what we do.

If you zoom in on the brain and look at neurons firing, where do you find thought? — jas0n

This is what a family member is doing:

We ask if sensory cortex activations during sleep can be decoded in a more concrete manner by inferring the imagery encoded in neural activations. We propose an ambitious approach in which we will train a deep neural network to learn pixel by pixel mappings between visual input presented to the awake mouse and neural activations in visual cortex. We will leverage our expertise in longitudinal tracking of individual neurons, and the large-scale neural recording capabilities of two-photon microscopy, to present 200k natural images to 10k of neurons, across multiple visual areas, over a 2-week period. We will then apply the trained model to decode the stimuli most likely to give rise to patterns of internally generated neural activity observed during sleep.

Is there something irreplaceable about human brain tissue? Or does 'consciousness' only require a host of the proper structure? Maybe (I don't know) silicon or something else can work just as well as brain tissue.

You mean silicon like in a computer?

We say it has no thought (because it doesn't speak), but if it inherited reactions to its environment, that might deserve to count as intelligence. — jas0n

It's not because it doesn't speak that I say a bacterium doesn't think. I say it because we can fully explain its behaviour, which looks like consciousness, by means of non-conscious biochemical processes. Also, it doesn't have the elaborate biological mechanisms (neurons and all that) that are so clearly linked to our consciousness (and that of other animals).

The bacterium's inherited reactions to its environment could be described as intelligent behaviour, but it's non-conscious.

Your intuition that what is necessary for consciousness that there be an inside and an outside is very interesting, as that is suggestive of the creation of two points of view, that of the subject (from the inside) and that of the external observer (from the outside). Is that where you are coming from? — bert1

No! The individuation of the organism creates one point of view. There is no external observer! And no reason to posit one!

The next question is: at what point in the evolutionary process did feeling first emerge? This is a hypothesis at the moment. How are we going to narrow down the possibilities? If we want to take a scientific approach, how do we test a system for the presence of consciousness?

Is it when the cell wall developed? — bert1

No. The cell wall (or something about the cell) creates the distinction between organism and environment, it creates a potential locus for consciousness, there has to be a discrete entity for consciousness to happen to, but I'd say consciousness itself came later. Maybe in fish. Maybe in worms.

The difficulty with the idea of two levels of description is that it creates a dualism, and imports many of the difficulties of that. — bert1

Have you read Searle's "Mind, a Brief Introduction"? Have a look at the introduction here: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=5G_iBwAAQBAJ&pg=PT11&lpg=PT11&dq=%22Mental+qua+mental+is+not+physical%22&source=bl&ots=3hWB2ubOkb&sig=ACfU3U34m0SpjL4espBNr3Hk2C87rhoT7g&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwib3L2HpJDwAhX5gf0HHYp6BBEQ6AEwAXoECAIQAw#v=onepage&q=%22Mental%20qua%20mental%20is%20not%20physical%22&f=false

I think you are falling into the trap he describes.

Zoom in on our neurons and AFAIK there's no localized special sauce. — jas0n

That's the second time you've used this rather tired metaphor/straw man. How about explaining what you mean in plain language.

The self minus thoughts. This relates to a different idea I've been thinking about.

A single celled organism has no thoughts, but it does have a "self", in that it is distinct from its environment.

Computing Science is my field of 'expertise,' in that I taught the subject for 30 years. — universeness

Translation is one of my fields of expertise, in that I have worked as a translator (using a "Computer Assisted Translation" or CAT tool) for 20 years.

To be sure, translation alone is not sufficiently impressive, but 'thought' is most directly manifest (perhaps) in language use. — jas0n

Machine translation doesn't "think" at all however, neither does it do what I do when I translate. Here's a concrete example, intended to illustrate what you do when you understand language, which a computer can't do:

1. The council members refused to allow the protestors to hold their rally as they feared violence.

2. The council members refused to allow the protestors to hold their rally as they advocated violence.

You can tell who "they" refers to in each case because of your immersion of a world of experience. The computer can't tell.

Why do you think it fails? — bert1

Information is a measure, not a cause.

I do like it when discussions of consciousness take seriously such phenomenological intuitions and reflections. — bert1

I don't.

Consciousness feels container like, it feels still and relatively unmoving (or sometimes does) — bert1

I could say "consciousness sometimes feels heavy so maybe it's a property of gravity". Just nonsense, sorry.

It doesn't necessarily require it, but it is very hard to think of a non-gradual, instant change in a system that could plausibly be associated with the emergence of consciousness. — bert1

But natural selection (I'll call it Chance) had billions of years to think of it (and billions of stars and planets).

And Chance had already thought of living organisms to work with. In my view it is only with the emergence of life that "systems" emerge. And points of view. Potential points of view. And locations in time and space. Because it is an entity distinct from its environment, a single-celled organism has a lifespan and a locus, things that don't feature in a lifeless universe.

It also has aims, non-conscious aims. Things are good or bad for it.

Life has a drive to evolve systems of increasing complexity, and at some point Chance thought of a mechanism for feeling. It seems likely that would be a development of an existing non-conscious mechanism.

My target is not those who believe that consciousness in insects is panpsychism.

You clearly miss the point of what panpsychism is as an idea. It is NOT necessarily about the ‘universe’ being conscious. — I like sushi

Panpsychism is the view that mentality is fundamental and ubiquitous in the natural world. — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/

Ubiquitous:present, appearing, or found everywhere.

My point is that your analogy doesn't stand up.

Panpsychism is the belief that every thing has an internal mental aspect. If you say consciousness is analogous to life in this respect, then you would be saying that every thing is alive.

Also, if insects are conscious, then we're getting pretty close to panpsychism. — RogueAI

No we bloody aren't! Insects are individual organisms, if they are conscious then it's them as individuals that are conscious, not the whole universe.

I tried to show that it reasonable to state that multicellular organisms are ‘living’ on a different level compared to single cells. — I like sushi

But they are all living. And non-biological items aren't.

How do you know they don't? — RogueAI

Why do you think they do?

Again, what's the relevance to the current discussion?